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Matthew Ball: Meet Leeds’s own globetrotting trombonist
Trombonist Matthew Ball.
As a trombonist, Matthew Ball, 29, is kept surprisingly busy with work not just in West Yorkshire but across the world.
“Over the years, the Leeds College of Music graduate has played with celebrities, appeared in movies and sessioned with some of the biggest names in pop. Interview by Neil Hudson.
I started playing the trombone at school when I was eight, I enjoyed it and by the time I was doing my A-levels I started getting into jazz and playing with swing bands. We played at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. Then someone recommended I do a jazz course at Leeds, which I ended up doing. By the time I graduated, I was already playing full time.
The recession has affected my work, 10 years ago I would know what I was doing for the next year, nowadays, there’s still lots of work, it just tends to be booked at the last minute. I freelance, so I work for all kinds of different shows and bands, mostly Motown, pop and big bands. Having said that, I play local venues too, so I think the last one I played was the Seven Arts Centre, Chapel Allerton.
“I’ve played all over the world: America, Africa, Spain, Italy, France, Sardinia, I’ve played with David Guest’s touring show, with Candi Staton and Gloria Gaynor, I played on Elbow’s last album, Seldom Seen Kid and with Leeds band Cherry Ghost and in the past have done stuff with Atomic Kitten.
The one thing I could not live without is my wife, Kate, and son, Alfie, who is now 15 months old. Having Alfie changed both our lives and Kate is now pregnant again and due in August. It makes us both wonder how much spare time we had beforehand and how little we did with it.
My first job was working as a leisure centre sports coach when I was still in the sixth form.
“To relax, I like cooking. It’s something I’ve taken up fairly recently because when I was at Leeds College of Music I was pretty ropey but now it’s something I really enjoy, I’ve even considered entering Master Chef. I’d say one of my hobbies is eating out. I also like to play golf, which I took up about two years ago. If I have a handicap, it’s probably the maximum.
My childhood was quite musical, my mum was a music teacher and my granddad was a saxophonist in Leeds. My brother, Andy, is also a professional drummer.
There are a few people I would like to meet: Stevie Wonder and Harry Connick Jnr, and also James Brown and Frank Sinatra, all of whom are or were big names in music.
Something that might surprise people is my wife and I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in January 2009 as part of our wedding anniversary. We went to Africa and did a safari and decided to climb it. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. It took five days to complete and out of 50 people who set off, only seven made it to the top. The funniest thing about that was that I wanted to quit and go back to the bottom but I kept on going purely because I thought Kate wanted to reach the top. She told me later that she wanted to quit too and that she only carried on because she thought I wanted to get to the top. We wouldn’t have done it without one another, so it was also one of the most rewarding things we have done.
“I recently started doing weddings after setting up a company called Gourmet Music, which is a jazz trio and we’ve done quite a few celebrity gigs, including one with Wayne Rooney and another about three years ago, which was a toga party and John Cleese was there and he ended up coming up on stage in his toga and playing my trombone. He was a really nice man.
I was asked to put together a 1920s quintet for the 2008 film Brideshead Revisited and I ended up being in the film with the Matthew Ball Quintet. We started to get other work off the back of that and it’s something that’s still going.
My joke is: what cheese do you give a bear? Camembert.
“The best thing about Leeds is the nightlife and the bars. I grew up in the West Midlands but my mum was from Leeds so I did know the city. We used to come here regularly to visit my grandparents. We live in Chapel Allerton now and I just like how there are different parts to the city which all have their own bars and restaurants. You don’t need to go into the centre for everything.”
* Matthew Ball’s website is: www.matthew-ball.co.uk
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